Thursday, February 12, 2009

Ginipic is a fantastic tool that enables you to search images on multiple image search engines, photo sharing websites or your own local picture collections simultaneously, and all that from the comfort of your desktop.

Ginipic can be docked to the side of your screen or it can also be used as a regular application. But docking it to the right-side of the screen is a much better option as it enables you to search and keep working at the same time. On Ginipic you can search images on 10 different sources - Flickr, Google Images, Yahoo! Images, SmugMug, DeviantArt, Live Search, Picasa, Photobucket, Facebook, and Fotolia (for some reason though, there was no Fotolia and Facebook when I installed on my PC). The developers promises that there will be no duplicates and I should probably believe them because I have seen none.

The number of search results you can view per page seems to depends on the size of your monitor. On my 19” screen, I was able to view 24 thumbnails when docked on the side and 128 thumbnails when I blew it full screen. The astounding number of results that get to see on each page is a great time saver.

When I click on the thumbnail, the image is downloaded and shown in a preview window. From this window you can save the image on your hard disk, share with your friends or on social media sites like Digg and Reddit, set as desktop background and so on. Drag the image to your image editor or your workplace and start using it instantly.

Ginipic focuses entirely on the images leaving all the clutter and text behind. But you can still choose to view the page from where the image was picked up. Just click on the “earth” icon on the preview window and your browser will be taken to the source page.

An application with such a sleek interface is expected to be resource heavy, but Ginipic is a little too hungry for memory. When you dock it on the side and perform a search from there, the application uses about 145 MB of memory. If you maximize it the memory use jumps to over 200 MB. Even if you clear the search results and minimize it, it still consumes about a 100 MB. It also takes quite a while to launch. Keeping aside it’s craving for system resources, Ginipic is still a great tool to have, particularly if you are frequent image searcher. The best of all – it’s free.